Can I vibe code Mixpanel?
Product analytics: events, funnels, retention, and cohorts.
Capturing events and answering basic product questions — how many users did X, where they drop in a funnel, how many come back next week — is buildable, and for a small app it is a genuinely useful weekend project. Where Mixpanel pulls ahead is scale and the analysis engine: a columnar store that runs funnel, retention, and cohort queries interactively over billions of events, plus a slick explorer for slicing data any direction. Your version will handle your own volume fine and answer the common questions; matching the speed and the exploratory depth at scale is the part you are trading away, so kinda.
Build a personal product-analytics tool (a Mixpanel alternative) for my own app. Part one: a tiny JavaScript beacon and a typed track(event, properties) helper that sends events to an ingest API with no PII. Part two: store events in a hosted Postgres with sensible indexes. Part three: a password-protected dashboard with a funnel builder (ordered steps with conversion rates), a weekly retention grid, an events-over-time chart, and simple property-based cohorts. Use Next.js App Router deployable to Vercel, respect Do Not Track, and be honest in the README that this targets modest volume — funnel and retention queries over very large event counts would need a columnar store, which is out of scope.
An event-tracking beacon plus a dashboard with funnels, retention, and simple cohorts for your own app's traffic.
- Interactive funnel and retention queries over billions of events
- The polished exploration UI for arbitrary slicing
- Cohort automation, alerts, and session analysis
- Scale, speed, and the columnar query engine underneath
- Integrations and warehouse sync out of the box
For a small app, self-built analytics are fine; for a real product team, the value is asking any question of huge event data and getting an answer in seconds, plus the exploration UI that makes it easy. That engine and its scale are the moat, and they are what the subscription buys once your volume grows.
A prompt is the first move, not the whole game. Course 01 teaches you to take a prompt like this one to a shipped, working app — reviewing, correcting, and steering the agent the whole way.
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